I used CDE for years in a Sun Blade workstation running Solaris 8 and I loved it. It was really nice and fast.

I think that many ideas from CDE are cool even today, iconification of running applications is one of them (similar to Windows 3.1 but better).

Unfortunately GNOME became the "de facto" standard of the majority of unix desktops (Solaris included) and CDE didn't get any major improvement since then.

I hope open source put CDE back at the top. :-)

I always liked CDE, and this is positive news. It's been over a decade since you could purchase it for Linux/FreeBSD. There has recently been an effort to create an open-source clone, which has been decently supported on FreeBSD.

Regarding the UI, CDE is a stable environment, and I always thought iconify to desktop was superior to a taskbar. If I could design a modern desktop, it would largely resemble the CDE layout, with live thumbnails of the minimized apps as opposed to fixed icons.

I don't know how much traction this will gain, except for nostalgic users. The beauty is, we have the option to keep using it.

I'm curious, why it was released now? The petitioning worked? (from http://www.marutan.net/cde/ seems there was some decent amount of good will; hm, and I just stumbled on it recently from http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/ ) The Open Group largely lost interest, and threw it out there for those still wanting to use it and/or maintaining older apps?